Nothing to Envy: Real Lives in North Korea by Barbara Demick: review

Simon Scott Plummer reads an account of the Stalinist cruelty of the Kim
dynasty in North Korea, as chronicled by Barbara Demick in Nothing to Envy

By Simon Scott Plummer

1:45PM GMT 15 Mar 2010

How does a Western reporter discover what life is really like in a hermetic, totalitarian state? Not by visiting, as Barbara Demick, then Seoul correspondent for the Los Angeles Times, discovered when she went to North Korea for the first time in 2005; two minders confined her to “a well-worn path of monuments to the glorious leadership of Kim Jong-il and his late father, Kim Il-sung”. A clearer picture came by interviewing people who had defected to South Korea.

Nothing to Envy: Real Lives in North Korea by Barbara Demick

Taking the cases of six individuals and their families, Demick constructs a harrowing narrative of the North’s slide into famine following the death of the elder Kim in 1994. Their plight is typified by Song Hee-suk, a mother of four and once a true believer. Economic collapse forces her to become an entrepreneur, making bean curd and biscuits. In quick succession, she loses her mother-in-law, husband and son to starvation. Her eldest daughter defects to the South via China and engineers the same escape for her mother.

Stories with a happy ending? It is not as simple as that. Northern defectors suffer from low self-esteem in the affluent South. The choices on offer can be paralysing for those brought up to rely on the state. Above all, they are racked by guilt over family members they have left behind, hoping against hope that the regime will disintegrate, enabling them to be reunited. Of that there is so far little sign. The Kim dynasty, whose Stalinist cruelty Demick graphically chronicles, has shown remarkable staying-power.